Ubuntu’s Role in Bug Management for the Whole Free Software Stack

“A distribution occupies a very specific niche in the free
software ecosystem. Among other things, we need to accept some
responsibility for ALL the software defects (‘bugs’) that users
actually experience across the entire stack. Most users
don’t install their apps from upstream source
tarballs, they install them from the packages provided by their
distribution. So when they experience a bug, they don’t know if
it’s a bug introduced by that distribution, or
a bug in the underlying upstream code. They don’t know, they don’t
care, and they shouldn’t have to. More often than not they will
report the issue to their distribution, and the way we respond to
it is important, because it represents an opportunity to make the
whole ecosystem more robust.

“I had a lecturer who was very opposed to the use of the term
‘bugs.’ He said that the term ‘bug’ was a cute-sification for
‘nasty biting insect,’ and similarly, software defects have
potentially serious consequences, so we shouldn’t treat them
lightly…”

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